“In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant–a new Elephant–an Elephant’s Child–who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

Moti Guj Mutineer (1891)

“Once upon a time there was a coffee planter in India who wished to clear some forest land for coffee planting. When he had cut down all the trees and burned the under-wood the stumps still remained. Dynamite is expensive and slow-fire slow. The happy medium for stump clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant.”

Toomai of the Elephants (1894)

“Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones.”

Con men want to convince a maid to steal from her employer. “Two Gallants” is the sixth story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, classic tales dealing thematically with miscommunication, isolation, class differences, and emotional paralysis in Joyce’s Ireland.

Narrated by Alex Wilson.

Originally for sale on December 3, 2006, and released free with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License five years later. See the Mission page for why.

What happens when you hypnotize a person in the moments before he dies? The story that began as a hoax (it was first published without the “fiction” label) is one of the first modern science fiction tales.

Against the then-popular condemnation of the radical abolitionist who seized a federal armory, attempting to arm slaves and create a violent rebelion against the South, Thoreau delivered this spirited speech justifying Brown’s character and actions to those who would have rather resolved (or failed to resolve) the issue of slavery using discussions and diplomacy. Read by Alex Wilson.

H G Wells was such a science fiction pioneer that he took all the great, archetypal titles (Think about it: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Magic Shop, etc.. You’d think he would have at least been generous enough to call it, say, “A Magic Shop,” allowing that Asimov or Heinlein might decades later want to write about another one.) So it goes with “The Valley of the Spiders.”

Three adventurers face danger, death, and giant spiders, all for the capture love of a woman, in this classic pulp adventure story. Read by Alex Wilson.